Even if people know little else about Joseph Campbell, they’re probably familiar with the phrase “Follow Your Bliss.” Indeed, I suspect there are folks out there who’ve heard and even used this phrase who might not know Campbell was its source. Not surprisingly for a catchphrase as well-known as this one, it’s sadly been reduced largely to a sort of bumper-sticker bromide.
In that clichéd understanding, “Follow Your Bliss” is roughly synonymous with another popular maxim from the 1960’s and 70’s, namely “if it feels good, do it.”. Aware of this tendency to trivialize the concept of following one’s bliss, Campbell tells us “if your bliss is just your fun and your excitement, you’re on the wrong track.” Indeed, such a misinterpretation of Campbell’s idea seriously trivializes what is, in essence, a profoundly spiritual concept
Derived from the Hindu tradition, mythologist William Doty writes that the term bliss in Campbell’s famous dictum refers to “the attainment of insight into one’s proper place in the universe, one’s appropriate relationship to the divine energies.” Bearing that understanding of “bliss” in mind, we can begin to comprehend that Campbell is offering us guidance which is neither easy nor simple. Indeed, far from being an offer of some easily-attainable sort of grace, following your bliss requires as much from us as it offers to us.
In other words, following one’s bliss, as Campbell saw it, is not merely a question of doing whatever we like, and most definitely not just doing what we’re told. Instead, it’s a matter of recognizing – we could even say remembering — that concern or activity which we are truly passionate about and then seeking to devote ourselves to that pursuit. In so doing, we will find our fullest potential as individuals while also serving the larger community to the greatest possible extent.
In Campbell’s view, the attainment of bliss is an outcome of wholeheartedly answering “yes” to the “call” of the “Hero’s Journey. Like everything else connected with the Hero’s Journey, finding and following one’s bliss requires a willingness to courageously defy both social and religious conventions. As Campbell often observed, such defiance requires risking both alienation and sacrifice. The alienation and sacrifice which frequently accompanies an intention to follow our bliss arise in large part because our culture’s focus on material gain and social status as the highest and most important life goals. The idea of bliss as Campbell employs the term has little if anything to do with the achievement of significant wealth or social prestige.
We can see the truth of this in the early events of Campbell’s own life. After completing the coursework for a Ph.D. in Medieval Literature at Columbia, he failed to get approval for his dissertation topic, which sought to combine literature with Sanskrit and modern art. Because his bliss, the study of comparative mythology, required an interdisciplinary approach to scholarship – something unheard of at the time — Campbell opted to withdraw from the program and never completed his Ph.D. As a result, he was denied access to higher-paying, more prestigious academic positions and ended up lecturing in relative obscurity for many years at Sarah Lawrence. And while Campbell achieved a good deal of recognition and admiration starting with the publication of his groundbreaking Hero with a Thousand Faces in 1949, he didn’t become a household name till after The Power of Myth television series was first broadcast in 1987, the year he died.
While often acknowledging the various challenges we must face in order to follow our bliss, Campbell also spoke movingly about all the ways we are helped by forces both seen an unseen in that pursuit. “Doors will open where there were no doors before,” he observed, “where you would not have thought there’d be doors, and where there wouldn’t be a door for anybody else.” Ultimately, as Campbell told Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth television series, “If you follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there the whole while, waiting for you, and the life you ought to be living is the one you are living.”